October 15th, 2012 by Lyle Smith

Mellanox SwitchX-2 Introduced, The World’s Fastest SDN Switch

Mellanox Technologies, provider of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, has announced SwitchX-2, the next generation of their switch silicon optimized for Software Defined Networking (SDN). Mellanox’s new SwitchX-2 is equipped with advanced capabilities of remote configurable routing tables, lossless and congestion free networks, efficient control planes, and SDNoptimized software interfaces. Additionally, it gives IT managers the ability to program and centralize their server and storage interconnect management and to significantly reduce operational expenses by completely virtualizing their data center network. According to IDC, the broader SDN/OpenFlow market is predicted to reach $2 billion by 2016, and a substantial portion of this growth will be in network infrastructure.

SwitchX-2 is designed with Mellanox’s Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) technology, allowing for simultaneous connection to InfiniBand or Ethernet with integrated gateways to legacy data center as well as storage systems. By using industry-first, RDMA-based 56GB/s Ethernet, and InfiniBand, SwitchX-2 is said to be the world’s fastest and most scalable SDN switch with unmatched 4Tb/s switching capacity-- 50% higher than its competitors. In addition, SwitchX-2 has the lowest power consumption in the industry, with exceptionally low 170ns latency, hardware-based L2/L3 congestion management for highest efficiency, and hardware-based data error correction for highest reliability. SwitchX-2’s advanced feature set allows for the creation of larger flat SDN networks with lower cost and higher performance, which provides the most efficient SDN solution for both InfiniBand and Ethernet data centers.